Hybrid Unified Kalman Tracking Algorithms for Heterogeneous Wireless Location Systems

Location estimation and tracking for mobile stations have attracted a significant amount of attention in recent years. Different types of signal sources are considered available to provide measurement inputs for location estimation and tracking in heterogeneous wireless networks. Various techniques have been studied and combined for location tracking, e.g., the least square methods for location estimation associated with the Kalman filters for location tracking. In this paper, the hybrid unified Kalman tracking (HUKT) technique is proposed to provide an integrated algorithm for precise location tracking based on both time of arrival (TOA) and time difference of arrival (TDOA) measurements. A new variable is incorporated as an additional state within the Kalman filtering formulation to consider the nonlinear behavior in the measurement update process. The relationship between this new variable and the desired location estimate is applied in the state update process of the Kalman filter. Three different designs of hybrid factor are proposed to adaptively adjust the weighting value between the TOA and TDOA measurements. Moreover, similar concepts are also utilized in the design of unified Kalman tracking schemes for pure TOA and TDOA measurement inputs in this paper. Compared with existing schemes, numerical results illustrate that the proposed HUKT algorithm can achieve enhanced accuracy for mobile location tracking, particularly under environments with an insufficient number of measurements in one of the signal paths.